Running 6.5 miles in Missouri: A trip back in time, sort of...

Poke around Nevada, Missouri, and you might think it's 1962. The largest employer in town is a big industrial plant where things are actually manufactured. The freight cars have no graffiti. And a big new Interstate highway is on the way!

All this reminded me of "Hilltown," the imaginary and somewhat idealized town that served as the setting of an elementary school textbook on personal hygiene, community service, and good citizenship.

Hilltown was made up, but Nevada was real. And that's what I thought about as I ran 6.5 miles, mostly in farmland beyond the city limits, early on Saturday, Sept. 29. Thus did Missouri become State #6 in my quest to run at least 10K in all 50. (By the way, it's pronounced "Ne-VAY-dah.")

Time? 1 hour, 23 minutes, starting at 7:15 a.m. Distance: yes, 6.5 miles, according to Google maps. Weather: temperatures in the 50s with a high broken overcast. The sun rose enough during the run to push me into a good sweat by the end.

We were staying in town to attend this year's annual Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola, Kansas, a town across the nearby border. Our hotel was run by an Indian family that did all its cooking on the premises, giving the place the unmistakeable ambiance of New Delhi.

My running route first took me east, underneath Route 71, which is about to be upgraded into something rare in this day and age: a brand-spanking-new Interstate highway! (In this case, Interstate 49.) Really -- the work in upgrading Route 71 to Interstate standards from Kansas City south to the Arkansas border is almost done, with even the signs in place and only lacking the actual numbers, which I read are supposed to go up this fall.

This whole "here comes the new Interstate" thing is something that must have been much more common a half-century ago, when the system was being built out at a rapid pace and significant new stretches were opening every construction season. Not so anymore -- except in Nevada, Missouri, which also happens to be devoid of any enclosed shopping malls or significant suburban shopping plazas. Coincidence?

I was taking a chance going out into the open countryside, but surprisingly, the roads and intersections were well marked. Once I hit Route 1800, I turned north and followed it to Nevada's Airport, where things were no busier than the open cropland I was otherwise surrounded by.

I then reached Route 54 (visible above, in the distance), which I took east back into town alongside the tracks of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, or so a map told me. I was surprised to see long lines of freight cars with absolutely no graffiti on them! You could even read all the reporting marks, which seem to be usually obscured by vandals. The oldest covered hopper car, for example, had been on the rails since February 1974.

When Route 54 turned west, I turned east, heading back to the hotel, but not before passing the massive 3M plant on the city's eastern side. This enormous facility, the largest area employer (610 are currently on the payroll) is refreshing in that things are actually made there, just like the factories on the edge of Hilltown.

Imagine that! But I didn't have to, as I saw it right before my eyes.

Next up: 10K or better in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I'm madly typing this out now.

Running 10K in Colorado:A jog through the housing bubble

Some people boast of having visited all 50 states. (I'm three short: Arkansas, North Dakota, and Alaska.) But how many people have run at least 10K in all 50 states?

I have no idea, but if I finish this odd quest, I'll be one of them. And on Thursday, Sept. 6, I added another one: Colorado, bringing me to a grand total of five.

Why was I in Colorado? It was a one-day visit that's best described in another place. What I want to do here is describe the run, which had its unusual aspects. Turns out I ran straight through one of the epicenters of America's great housing bubble disaster stories, and I didn't even know it.

First, I was based in a Days Inn on Tower Road, an area of open prairie about 20 miles northeast of downtown Denver that's only seen development in the years since Denver's "new" airport opened in 1995. (I put "new" in quotes because how new is anything from 1995 anymore?)

The area is divided into large squares of criss-crossing boulevards, many not yet extant. Right now, the unfinished checkerboard delineates a surreal landscape of finished neighborhoods abutting open land. Sidewalks come and go, roads disappear into the scrub, and the area is dotted with pumping stations for several major oil and natural gas pipelines that run diagonally underneath it all.

It's weird: when a full neighborhood goes in over a pipeline, you can still follow the route because nothing can actually be built on top of it, which results in peculiar open spaces running diagonally through the otherwise orderly blocks—at least those that are finished.

The day was hot (low 90s) and bone dry, and I only had a few hours in the afternoon for my run, so I couldn't wait for cooler weather. Thankfully, high clouds moved in during the run, screening out the brightest sunshine and preventing me from burning to a crisp. Denver's altitude of 5,000 feet above sea level was also a factor to reckon with, both in terms of sun and also oxygen levels.

Checking maps online, I aimed for an area a few miles to the south called "Green Valley Ranch," a seemingly pleasant area to run. (Sidewalks, yay!) Starting at 72nd Ave., I hoped to get as far south as 40th Ave., and then come back in a loop.

Well, off I went, into a strange and unfinished world. One minute I'm on a newly built sidewalk complete with handicapped warning strips in the curb cuts. The next minute, I'm in open scrub land with nothing more than a broken beer bottle shards to keep me company. I got as far south as about 53rd Ave. when I felt I had to turn around, due to time and also the heat getting to me.

Coming back, I made the mistake of turning up a long boulevard that was a dead-end. No problem: I could see the hotel about a half-mile off across some open scrub land, without any evident barriers. So off I went, leaving the grid and freelancing through the empty land, picking my way through strange weeds and anthills and the occasional sign warning of yet another buried pipeline. Besidessome nettles getting stuck on (and in!) my running shoes, I made it across relatively unharmed.

But then I looked at Google's satellite photo of the area (copied above), and it turns out the open area I ran through had been excavated enough for a street pattern to be visible. Check it out: the dead-end road to the school is straight up-and-down on the right of the image. The hotel complex is in the upper left. The area that I ran across appears as a kind of eggplant color, and look at all the streets that are visible!

What happened? Well, the housing bubble burst is what happened, and this area of Denver was absolutely devastated. It was so bad, USA Today once featured a map of one corner of Green Valley Ranch showing how many properties had been foreclosed on between 2006 and 2008:

Red = foreclosed. Wow! On a few streets, it's practically every other property!

And that was certainly why the open area I crossed never got any further than some basic excavation perhaps a few years ago, just before the music stopped. I have to say, I had no sense that anything had been done to the land, so it's quickly returned to its natural state, at least to the naked eye at ground level.

But Google's satellite image of this area must be at least several years out of date (as of September 2012) as several areas I passed through have since been filled in. The photo, for example, shows a vacant lot in front of the Days Inn, but there's now a brand-spanking-new 7-Eleven convenience store. I used it to buy water, so it was not a mirage.

One thing I also saw that's not visible in the satellite photo is a jack rabbit who popped up in front of me near one of the hotels as I neared the end. He disappeared into a bush, and then I disappeared into the Days Inn, for a shower, a change of clothes, and the flight home. State No. 5 in the books: 6.3 miles (just barely over the minimum of 6.2 miles, or a 10K) in 1 hour and 15 minutes, although the heat made it feel longer.

Next up: Shooting for both Missouri and Arkansas during a five-day visit to these states at the end of the month. And then there's possibly Illinois the first weekend of October, when I'm in Chicago for a conference. We'll see. And Texas is somewhere there in October, as I'm flying to Dallas for business and there might be time for a run.

Saturday, Sept. 22: Marlborough, Town #138

Back before we had refrigerators, we had libraries. In the early days, some private libraries charged user fees. But if a town set up a library open to all residents, it was a "free" library, and often identified as such.

This explains the presence of the oddly named "Frost Free Library" in Marlborough, N.H., where I ran a 5K this morning in pretty much ideal conditions: cool but not cold, low overcast but dry, an occasional light breeze but not really any wind. (No frost, although I'm not sure the library had anything to do with that.)

All in all, not too shabby for the first day of fall (today at 10:49 a.m.), and for Town #138 in my quest to run in all of New Hampshire's cities, towns, and unincorporated places.

Marlborough was something of a milestone, too, as it completes the set of seven Granite State communities in which I've lived. (Nashua, Claremont, Keene, Marlborough, Milford, Manchester, and Bedford.) As of today, I've run a road race in all of them. I've also run a race in more than half of the Granite State's "cigarette" communities: besides Marlborough, I've done Salem and Newport. Still need Winchester and Chesterfield, however.

Time? A fairly acceptable 31:40, not bad considering the up-and-down nature of the course and relative lack of steady running in recent months. (The picturesque cemeteries we passed were a reminder.) Pace was 10:12, and I came in 59 out of 94 finishers.

On hand for Town #138 were Dave and Patsy Beffa, friends from Nelson, N.H. I worked with Dave at PC Connection some years back, and we were all part of a 10-day trek to Annapurna Base Camp (Elevation 13,500 feet) in Nepal in 2011.

I usually run by myself, and I've never quite understood how people can hold conversations while running. How do you manage your breathing and pacing? But I found while running alongside David, my inability to keep my mouth shut revealed an upside to it: the adrenaline that comes from interacting with people while you're on the course seems to push you through that, or at least it did with Dave.

Best line of the run was me to Dave about mid-day through: "My problem is that I only really kick in after Mile 4 or so."

Well, that's the best I could do. Perhaps I should check out a good joke book from the Frost Free Library.

Great Minds Department: After eating two apples on the way up here, I find the post-race snack supply to consist solely of—apples! All I can say is, thank God for the Peterborough Diner on the way home!

Updating things for September: Running, biking, trying to stay sane

I have a new motivation for pursuing fitness activities. With my mother in and out of the hospital, and plenty of other uncertainties, lately it's the one thing that keeps me sane. Really. I find that nothing helps put everything in perspective like a long run or a very long bike ride. For a day or two afterwards, I have unlimited patience. Nothing seems to get to me.

We all respond to stress in various ways. I have a tendency toward compulsive eating when under stress, a very unfortunate habit. I recall that during the first Gulf War, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater put on a lot of weight, in part because of the stress. I'm not fighting the Gulf War, but the personal stakes are just as high, and I can't let bad habits take over.

So, into September we go, with me trying to stay active outdoors while the days are still long enough and before the weather turns. And the first thing to point out is that what's good for me is good for our three dogs. They all need exercise, and that alone ought to be enough to keep me busy. I run with them, but could do it more regularly. And so I'll try.

The bike is turning into the big story of 2012. I've already biked the Kanc, done an 88-mile trek to Harrisville, and rode to the seacoast for fried clams. The one big one left for this season, I think, is a White Mountains loop. I was going to do it today (Sunday, Sept. 9) but I've gotten a late start and too much to do at home base. So today it's running with dogs and maybe a two-hour New Boston bike loop to finish out the day. I'll hope ffor

Running isn't being forgotten, either, although I've missed a few town races in the past month and total has been stagnant since the triathlon in Surry, N.H., and that was back in July, f'chrissakes. Well, a clutch of a half-dozen towns beckon for this fall, including a half-marathon in Manchester, N.H., so that's something to look forward to.

And I've made progress on the "running in 50 states" project as well. On Thursday, Sept. 6, I squeezed in a 10K run through the prairie suburbs of Denver during a whirlwind one-day visit, thus adding Colorado to the list. And later this month, I could potentially pick up two more during a visit to Missouri/Kansas/Arkansas/Oklahoma. I already have Kansas, so realistically it's Missouri and then Arkansas.

Looking ahead to colder weather, I still have a gym membership at Planet Fitness on Manchester's West Side, and I also need to find a place to start swimming regularly so I can seriously participate in more triathlons next year. We'll see. In the meantime, I do need to keep activity to keep my sanity.

In which I ride to the Seacoast for a once-a-year fried clams ritual

A destination worth pedaling for. An image from www.yelp.com a few years back; the date is repainted every season.

On Sunday, Sept. 2, I rode my bike to the Seacoast to get fried clams. But not just any fried clams—no, these came from Ceal's Clam Stand, a modest shack on Route 1A in Seabrook, N.H. that serves the best I've ever had. Seabrook is also home to our state's only nuclear power plant and several of the co-conspirators in the infamous Pamela Smart murder case; more on that below.

Back to clams: Trouble is, Ceal's open for business for only a short window each year, from Memorial Day until Labor Day. With this Brigadoon of roadside seafood closing for the season this weekend, I resolved to get out there and get my share before the 2012 season came to close.

(I usually only allow myself one visit a year, for as good as the fried clams are, I know they're not actually good for me. But several chances to stop out there this summer didn't happen, leading to this last-minute steeplechase.)

I left the house in Bedford, N.H. at 12:30 p.m. under cloudy skies and headed east. The afternoon wasn't as warm as I expected, and in some places along the way I actually felt chilly. The route to Seabrook (46.2 miles, according to Google maps) took me past places with personal connections, making the whole thing a kind of two-wheeled Proustian journey.

For example: Barely two miles from home, and still in Bedford, I pedaled past Hawthorne Drive, where my mother recently moved into an assisted living place after 84 years of residency in Nashua, N.H. Thinking I should do something, I waved!

Then it was across the Merrimack via the new Airport access Road bridge, then along the southern perimeter of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, where I saw not one but two Delta aircraft take off. (My dad was employed by Northeast Airlines, a precessor of Delta.)

With parents taken care of, I wound my way to Route 28 and headed south into Derry, joining the route not far from where my wife and I adopted our beloved dog Holly, who passed away in 2009. At the same time, I was close by the place where we take our current three dogs for daycare and servicing.

The ride into Derry is pretty non-descript, with Route 28 an odyssey of industrial buildings, billboards, swampland, crumbling pavement and aggressive drivers. After picking my way through a stretch of construction as the road entered Derry, I turned onto Tsienetto Road, passing by the start/finish of the first 5K I ran after developing adult onset Type 2 diabetes in 2000. (And near a nursing home where my wife once worked!)

Shortly after, I went through the condo development where Pam Smart had her husband Gregory murdered, one of the big stories when I was a working reporter. (As opposed to what I am now.) For years I've been planning to create an opera based on this incidident, and it still might happen.

And on and on. After swinging around the Derry traffic circle with relative ease (just get right behind a car and it works fine), I turned onto the Hampstead Road and found myself in the less frenetic area of East Derry, childhood home of astronaut Alan B. Shepard and also the location of a surprisingly long upgrade that I never noticed before.

I ground up the long hill until reaching the store at the top, where I stopped for water. (I had two bottles in my pack but decided to keep them for emergencies and otherwise follow the "buy as you go" plan.) Just after 1:30 p.m., so I was sticking to my usual pattern of one-hour intervals, it seemed.

We interrupt this increasingly long post with an image of our final destination, complete with big red garbage can near the food pick-up area. Now that's confidence! (And actually, convenience.)

Moving on, the Hampstead Road is a quiet stretch with a few big ups and downs, but the road isn't in the best of shape, so it's no picnic. Just after the Hampstead line, I turned right onto Main Street, and a whole other set of connections kicked in.

Just up the road was the house of a former co-worker at the Nashua Telegraph (we're talking like 25 years ago now, folks) and fellow Nashua native. Nearby was a cemetery where his first wife was buried after she succumbed to leukemia in 1990. And so on. With so much to think about, the miles flew by, up and downgrade.

As I neared Route 111, I swing left onto Emerson Road, and remembered that this was the exact spot of a road race I ran in Hampstead in maybe 2003. It was notable because of the hundred-plus races I've participated in since 2000, the Hampstead one had the second smallest turnout: a total of eight of us, each carrying a numbered popsicle stick so they could record our times at the end.

After some uncertainty about when I would hit Route 111, there it was: the biggest highway of the day, with long straight-aways, moderate grades, and a generous shoulder. Alas, an easterly breeze had picked up (a sign I was getting close to the coast), so it took some work to maintain speed on this section. And then I realized I had biked this exact road before—in 1985, when I rode from Nashua to Exeter to visit a girlfriend who was enrolled in a summer program at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Route 111 joined with Route 125 outside Kingston, but I soon turned onto less-travelled Route 107, which would bring me almost all the rest of the way. With 111 and 125 so flat, I figgered the rest of the route would be a piece of cake, but no. East Kingston, Kensington, and then Seabrook are full of hills, some of them quite long and steep.

Hadn't expected that, and it was enough to prompt me to make my second stop of the day (about 3 p.m.), at Jones General Store on Route 107, hard by the main railroad line connecting Boston to Portland, Maine, here just a single track even with 10 daily trips by the Downeaster passenger train.

More connections: East Kingston was notable for the road race some years ago in which a local cop started it by firing an actual gun in air!

I figgered I had less than an hour to go, but the ups and downs in Kensington made it the toughest part of the ride. Nice road, though—not much of a shoulder but solid and smooth and not crumbling at the edges. At one point, I topped a grade and looked around at an agricultural vista that stretched for miles. (But still no ocean.)

I didn't know this road, but I remembered that Kensington was the home of James MacQuarrie, a Pan Am pilot who was captain of the ill-fated Flight 103 from London Heathrow to JFK, which was destroyed by a bomb in the cargo hold a few days before Christmas, 1988. I tell you, I'm full of delightful trivia.

Funny how town borders can mean big changes. Kensington is a beautiful area, full of historic homes and older stately farms that have worn the years well and are now largely owned by horse people and other people of means. Things noticeably change when you cross the line in Seabrook, a much more—well, down-to-earth place.

The first big landmark is the former Seabrook Greyhound Park. (I always wondered where that was.) It's all simucast racing now, and maintains a "casino room" offering all kinds of gambling that I thought was illegal in New Hampshire. Roulette, anyone? Those heading to the tables this Labor Day weekend had to drive all the way across a massive empty parking lot (left over from better days, I presume), part of which was so grown up with grass that it looked like a sod farm. The whole place had the air of an old mall from the 1970s that had lost its anchor stores.

Then it was up and over Interstate 95, after which Route 107 dead-ended on good old Route 1, the coastal highway, this stretch of which is chock-a-block with strip mall developments, auto service centers, and fast food restaurants. However, luck was with me as I hit all the intersections on green lights (yes!), and in some cases even outpaced the slow-moving traffic! Fried clams at Ceal's will do that to you, and I was closing in.

After picking my way through the weird traffic circle just before the Massaschusetts line (Hey! Different political signs!), I followed Route 1 into the Bay State for a short distance until reaching my final leg to the coast: Route 286. This modest two-lane road swung back over the border (at the point where it crosses the sadly abandoned rail line between Portsmouth, N.H. and Newburyport, Mass.) and then makes a virtually straight shot over the marshes to the actual end of land.

As soon as you clear the trees and enter the marshes, you know you're getting close, as the slightly sour tidal scent of the sea fills your nostrils and deeply embedded memories of exciting childhood times at the beach starts the adrenaline pumping.

But that's countered today with a vicious headwind coming straight off the Atlantic, prompting me to gear down just to keep going, even though the road is dead flat. For a time, we're on an isolated causeway that's New Hampshire's answer to the Everglades. Far on the left, the nuclear power plant's dome comes into view. Ahead, far ahead, across the open marsh, is the actual seaside, with its dunes and driftwood and promises of civilization and skee ball and yes, fried clams.

Yet one more obstacle looms: it seems the Seabrook Fire Department is operated an "MDA Toll Booth" up ahead to support the annual Labor Day telethon to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy research. I'm not opposed to donating, but the light changes and the firefighters wave me through with a smile.

Then it's a left onto Route 1A, the real Main Street of New Hampshire's honky-tonk seaside, and a short distance north until I round a bend and at least Ceal's comes into view. Yes! I pull into the parking area, lean my bike against a Coke machine, and get in line. (There's always a line, even at 4 p.m. It's that good.)

There it is, the now requisite "bike made it there shot," taken by me with the cell phone, as this time I totally forgot my camera.

So 3½ hours to do 46.2 miles. Not bad. I keep it simple, knowing that I will have to pedal at least part of the way home: a single small order of fried clams and a side order of cole slaw, $16.95. I'm number 82. It takes awhile for the food to come up (they cook everything to order), but at 4:20 p.m., my number is called and I receive my cardboard box with beachside culinary nirvana: fried clams in a white wax paper box with red stripes (the only proper container), and coleslaw packed into a styrofoam coffee cup with a lid on it.

The meal, photographed via cell phone prior to consumption.

And, in a last-minute save, I realized that the picnic table at which I was sitting was downwind of the "sweet waffle" scent from a nearby ice cream business, which was completely wrong for fried clams. I quickly moved to the other side of Ceal's and all was right.

I will not attempt to describe this meal to you or how deeply satisfying it was. For one thing, I'm not Gordon Ramsey (I don't have his vocabulary), and for another, this post has gone on long enough. But I will say that I was worried, because since a "fried clams safari" on the Maine coast two summers ago for a newspaper story, I had lost my appetite for fried clams. Having five meals of them in one day, no matter how good, will do that to you.

But Ceal's, ah yes.

And, in another stroke of perfect timing, my wife called just as I was finishing the last clam. She was leaving work in Salem, N.H., and our plan was for her to drive up Route 111 to the coast until she found me, then give me a life home. (I didn't think I was up to getting all the way back on my own: 90 miles!) I began pedaling back, and with a tailwind, made it all the way to Emerson Road on Route 111 in Hampstead in 90 minutes (much further than I expected), where I got my ride and got saved from extra-sore ass cheeks.

More adventures loom for this month, but 67.6 miles on a bike is enough for now. I'll check in with other goals and plans (including a "50-state run" coming up later this week) next time.